Terms of Service

Lokam is a listing and discovery platform. We help residents find businesses near them, and we give those businesses a place to be found. That is the whole of what we do.

A business listed here may sell things — a shop with a price list you can order from — or do things — a trade you contact with a request, like a mehndi artist or an electrician. Many do both, and one business is one listing whichever it does. Where the rules below differ, they differ by what is being arranged, never by what kind of business it is.

We are not the seller, and we do not perform the service. When you order something or ask a business to do a job, the agreement is between you and that business. We are not a party to it. We do not own the goods, set the prices, prepare the food, decide what is stocked, or carry out any work.

We do not handle the money. Payment goes directly from you to the business, using their own UPI or bank details. We never receive, hold, or hold back that money, and there is no escrow. For an order the app records the fact of payment — the reference number you enter, and the business marking the order paid — so that both of you have the same record of it. For a service arranged through a request, the app records no payment at all: what you agree to pay, and how, is entirely between the two of you.

We do not deliver anything. We do not operate a delivery fleet or a courier service. How an order gets from the shop to you — you collect it, or they drop it over — is arranged between the two of you.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: if an order or a job goes wrong, your counterpart is the business, not us. We will help where we can (see disputes), but we cannot refund money we never held.

Lokam is operated by Arnanda Technologies Private Limited, Flat No. 501, Sai Nilayam, H.No. 2-108, Plot Nos. 481, 482 & 483, Chandanagar, Hyderabad, Rangareddy, Telangana 500050, India. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean that company.

By creating an account or using Lokam, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account. You may hold only one account per phone number, and you must give accurate details — particularly your phone number, since it is how you sign in and how a business reaches you about your order or your request.

You sign in with a one-time code sent to your phone by SMS. Anyone holding your phone can therefore sign in as you. Keep the number secure, and tell us promptly if you lose control of it.

A business is not a separate account. If you run one, it belongs to your account: you sign in as yourself with the same one-time code and switch into it. There is no separate business password to set or lose. So whoever can sign in as you can also act as your business — which is the same reason to keep your number secure, stated once more because it matters more here.

Some communities are closed, and joining one may require an invitation or an approval from an administrator. Do not misrepresent where you live in order to get into a community you are not part of.

If the place you operate from is not listed, you can register it. That may be where you live — your own house, an apartment block, or a gated community — or, if you run your business from its own premises, that shop or unit. Register only a place you genuinely live in or trade from, and describe its address accurately: it is what buyers collect from and what distance to you is measured from. Registering somewhere you have no connection to, or registering a society that already exists a second time, is a misuse of the service.

Before your business can be found by shoppers, one or two things may need checking. A place shared by several households — an apartment block or a society — is reviewed by us before it becomes visible, so that neighbours are not split across duplicate listings. To run a business from your home inside a community, you must be a verified member of that community, because you are claiming to live there. And a business with its own premisesinside somebody else's community is reviewed by an administrator before it is listed there — the owner of a shop in a society's arcade may perfectly well live elsewhere, so membership would be the wrong test.

While any of that is pending, your account works normally; your business simply is not yet visible to shoppers. A place used only by you — your own house, or your own premises — is listed for your business straight away and does not get a public page of its own.

Every listing on Lokam — a shop with a price list, a trade you send a request to, or a business that is both — means one thing: that business asked to be listed. It is not a recommendation, an endorsement, a background check, or any assurance about quality, pricing, licensing, insurance, or safety. Satisfy yourself before you order from or engage anyone you find here, exactly as you would with a number from a noticeboard.

Nor is a listing a claim by us about who someone is. A business tells us what it does and where it works from, and we show that. Where we do check something before a listing appears, it is only what is described under your account above — whether a place is a duplicate, whether someone belongs to the community they say they do — never whether a business is any good at its work. We do not inspect anyone's premises, confirm that they do what they say they do, or verify that a licence they mention exists.

Contact details shown on a listing are for reaching that business about its own goods or services. Do not scrape them, resell them, or use them to send marketing.

Prices, availability, ingredients, weights, photos, and descriptions of what a business will do are provided by that business, not by us. We do not verify them. If something matters to you — an allergen, a use-by date, whether an item is truly homemade, whether a tradesperson is insured — ask before you commit.

Orders. Paying is a direct transfer to the business. Enter the transaction reference honestly, and only after you have actually paid. Marking an order paid when it is not is a misuse of the service.

Service requests. A request is an enquiry, not a booking and not a purchase. It tells a business what you want and puts the two of you in touch; the business may accept or decline it, and nothing is agreed until you agree it between yourselves. Any price shown against a service is an indication given by the business — some are fixed, some read “from” a figure or “on inspection” — and the final price, like the payment itself, is settled directly with them and is not recorded here.

Cancellations, replacements, and refunds are between you and the business. Because we never hold the money, we cannot reverse a payment or compel a refund.

This section applies to every business listed here — whether you sell goods, do jobs for people, or both, and whether you work from your home or from your own premises. The rules are the same because the responsibility is the same.

You are responsible for what you sell or do, and for everything your listing says. That includes holding whatever registrations or licences the law requires of you — food-safety law if you sell or prepare food, and any trade licence, registration, or insurance your work requires. Lokam does not obtain, hold, or check any such licence on your behalf, and listing here is not evidence that you hold one.

You agree to describe accurately what you offer and what it costs, to keep your listing current — including taking down what you can no longer supply or no longer do — and to treat the people who contact you through Lokam fairly.

If you take orders, you agree to honour the price shown when an order was placed, and to mark an order paid only when you have actually been paid.

If you take service requests, you agree to respond to them honestly — accepting or declining rather than leaving someone waiting — and not to treat a request as a confirmed job before you have agreed it with the customer. Prices you publish against a service should be a fair indication of what you will actually charge.

You must not list anything you are not legally allowed to sell or offer. That includes alcohol, tobacco, drugs and prescription medicines, weapons, live animals, counterfeit or stolen goods, and anything whose sale or performance requires a licence you do not hold.

You are responsible for your own tax position, including any GST that applies to what you sell or do. Any invoice the platform helps you produce is a convenience; it does not make us your accountant, and it does not transfer that responsibility to us.

Browsing, ordering, and sending a service request are free. A business may pay a plan fee to be listed — one fee for the business, whether it sells goods, offers services, or both. The fee, and the period it covers, are shown before you pay — that displayed figure is the agreement, not any number quoted elsewhere.

This is the one payment that comes to us rather than to another user. It is collected either through our payment gateway or by a bank transfer we confirm manually. Your card details are handled by the gateway; we never see or store them.

Plan fees are paid in advance for the period shown and are not refundable once the period has begun, except where the law requires otherwise or where we end your listing for a reason that is not your fault. A plan gives you a listing; it does not guarantee any level of sales, views, or ranking.

You keep ownership of the photos, descriptions, classified listings, and reviews you post. You give us permission to host and display them within Lokam so the service can work — showing your product photo on your storefront, your listing on the community board, your review under a business. That permission ends when the content comes down, apart from copies in ordinary backups.

Only post what is yours to post. Do not upload other people's photos or text without permission, and do not post anything unlawful, misleading, hateful, obscene, or that reveals another person's private information.

Reviews must describe a real experience. Do not write reviews of your own business, pay for reviews, or write reviews to damage a competitor.

We may remove content that breaks these rules, and we may act on reports from other residents. We do not, however, review everything before it appears — so treat what other users post as their claim, not ours.

Do not attempt to break, overload, or probe the service; do not try to reach accounts, data, or areas that are not yours; do not scrape it in bulk; and do not use it to send spam. Do not impersonate anyone, and do not use Lokam to harass another resident or business. Do not send service requests you have no intention of following up.

Disagreements about an order, a payment, or a piece of work are between the people involved. Where the app can help, it does — an order and a service request each carry a status history both sides can see, and you can raise a payment dispute when a business has not marked your payment as received. Because a service is paid for off the platform, there is no equivalent payment record for one, and so nothing for us to look at.

We may look at that record and take account of it in how we treat an account. That is the limit of our role: we can act on the platform, we cannot adjudicate your transaction, and we cannot move money between you.

We may suspend or remove an account, a listing, or a piece of content if these terms are broken, if the law requires it, or if leaving it up would put other users at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why.

You can stop using Lokam at any time, and you can ask us to close your account. Please read the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data when you do — in particular, closing an account disables it rather than erasing your history, and records tied to past orders are kept.

We work to keep Lokam running and accurate, but we do not promise that it will always be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors, and we may change or withdraw features. To the extent the law allows, the service is provided without warranties of any kind.

We make no promise at all about goods, services, or claims offered by businesses on the platform. They are theirs.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud.

Otherwise, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, or indirect or consequential loss; and our total liability to you for any claim connected with Lokam is limited to the plan fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or ₹1,000 if you paid us nothing.

We are not liable for the acts or omissions of a business listed here or of another resident.

We may update these terms as the product changes. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page, and where the change is significant we will tell you in the app. Continuing to use Lokam after a change means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, please close your account.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Hyderabad, Telangana have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

Questions about these terms — or anything else — can go to shop.lokam@gmail.com, or by post to Arnanda Technologies Private Limited, Flat No. 501, Sai Nilayam, H.No. 2-108, Plot Nos. 481, 482 & 483, Chandanagar, Hyderabad, Rangareddy, Telangana 500050, India.